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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#141

Post by nyanpasu64 »

liuliu wrote: post #123
miohtama wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working on the mobile web server project. The project was heavily subcontracted to a company in Oulu, Finland, where I worked by the time before starting a career in open source and Python consultancy. Mobile web server was a Series 60 web server, based on Apache, some glue and reverse proxy gateway (written in Java). You could deploy your own “apps” that could be accessed by anyone, running on your mobile phon…

Binary dump / prewarmed up Python interpreter would be amazing even today. Could enable a lot use cases with Python.

youtube-dl/yt-dlp (Python) is a full second slower than youtubedr (Go) or youtube.com (JS) to download YouTube videos, and I think a lot of that is due to interpreter warmup (though I don't know exactly why). Sadly mpv only supports youtube-dl/yt-dlp for watching videos, and youtubedr doesn't have the vast plugin ecosystem of yt-dlp for non-YouTube websites.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#142

Post by girvo »

lproven wrote: post #101
markb139 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first faxes sent and received :)

Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable…

I loved UIQ3. My M600i is still my second-favourite smartphone, only overtaken by the Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego

Re: Symbian Source Code

#143

Post by girvo »

8ytecoder wrote: post #40
orev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated everything about the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to send pictures. This is one of the things that I think modern techies have forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the only ones with enough market power to force carriers o…

This was true in the US. I don’t know about Europe. But it wasn’t true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn’t have much success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia and Sony didn’t have much success in the US. So it was really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and Nokias of the era. Symbian didn’t screw up the UI and it certainly was…

It was half true in the mid 2000s in Australia. While you could put basically any device on to the network, Telstra and Optus definitely held a some sway over manufacturers.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#144

Post by girvo »

atleta wrote: post #43
substation13 wrote: post #2

Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.

Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is a huge mistake. By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years. (That would become Meego.) But, i…

Its such a shame too, because Meego and the UI they built for the Nokia N9 was still ahead of it's time, and absolutely excellent to use. But it was dead on arrival, aside from us geeks who loved the idea of Debian on a phone :)

Re: Symbian Source Code

#146

Post by jillesvangurp »

kerpele wrote: post #107
jillesvangurp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally the N8 was going to run Meego. The N8 should have been a flagship phone running Linux. Instead they chickened out and and went with Symbian instead; pretty late in the development process. I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode that would stay on during the ni…

Not sure where your information that n8 was supposed to run Meego comes from, but I remember working with the Nokia s60 team already early 2009 and they were using n8 protos at the time. It’s definitely possible that there were two parallel projects though. On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI elements were designed to be small. Only…

That would have been around the time when they should have launched a successor to the N800, which launched in 2007. As I recall, the n8 was originally designed to be that.

Meego/maemo had several UI redesigns. The issue was that Nokia just kept ripping it apart instead of just fixing it. The reason for the pen was resistive screens. Bigger buttons would have been an OK solution. The later n900 had the same issue. Ultimately, they bought QT to fix Symbian and then made the Meego team switch to that. They wasted years on the UI. Jolla emerged out of the ashes of that and is still around. Samsung's Bada is another descendant.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#147

Post by danrocks »

atleta wrote: post #39

I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he needed the source code and the build environment for the OS. And for that he needed quite a few people to agr…

I probably know you, or some of your colleagues. Worked in Mountain View during the late 2000s. I really hated Symbian with a passion, and I was on the Java (and then Qt) side of it. It was embarrassing to try to sell that thing to external developers, but that was part of my job. I was a good soldier though, and ended up writing a few chapters in the worst computer programming book of all time, on how to do JavaME development on Symbian. That does NOT go on my resume.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#148

Post by chipotle_coyote »

dietrichepp wrote: post #140
lproven wrote: post #38

It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early on, in the smartphone era. It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance of doubt: this is a good thing .) Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: h…

Worth mentioning the N-Gage, which got a Wordle port recently, powered by SDL2: https://hackaday.com/2022/04/08/wordle-comes-to-the-nokia-n-... I remember the N-Gage being lambasted when it came out, but recently I realized that those same people also lambasted the iPod, and maybe I can't trust those people's judgment about tech. You know, the Slashdot crowd. Maybe it was a good system that was just poorly positioned…

The original N-Gage made a few astoundingly bad industrial design decisions that came up in literally every review.

* They put the phone microphone and speaker on the side of the device, which meant holding the top of the gadget to your head if you wanted to use it as a phone without a headset -- this was both awkward physically and looked phenomenally stupid.

* You had to remove the battery to get to the game cartridge slot! Again, really awkward. Really, the ergonomics overall were kind of baffling.

* It had a portrait orientation screen that was slightly lower resolution than the Game Boy's, which made doing ports of games designed for the landscape orientation more common everywhere else more difficult.

The updated "QD" version fixed a lot of the weirdness, and it's possible that if it had been the original N-Gage, things might have gone a lot differently.

Of course, that's kind of a theme in the Nokia story in the mid-to-late 2000s, I think -- they got really good at shipping terrific products just a couple years later than they should have. If Symbian^3 and the N8 had come out in 2008 instead of 2010, Nokia's fate might have been pretty different. (Emphasis on "might," to be sure.)

Re: Symbian Source Code

#149

Post by slim »

antiverse wrote: post #22

For anyone wanting to play Nokia N-Gage games (S60? I forget), there is already a lengthy walkthrough and setup of how to emulate the games on Windows that is available on The Internet Archive; complete with a torrent/zip of all the games on the system.

hmd global should really bring back the ngage

Re: Symbian Source Code

#150

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

atleta wrote: post #39

I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he needed the source code and the build environment for the OS. And for that he needed quite a few people to agr…

> No wonder it couldn't keep up with android and ios.

I remember my first few years of Android/iOS, There would occasion where the 'old Nokia(Symbian) could do it better'; On Android it was largely limited to battery management(similar screen size), Multitasking and on iOS it was everything from SMS forwarding to bluetooth sharing.

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